With a net worth of $97 billion, capitalism has been good to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and he thinks it's a good system. Still, "There's no free lunch here. You'd have to collect more money," Gates told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday.That money should come from rich people in the form of higher taxes, he said. "As you go about doing this additional collection, of course you want to be progressive. You want the portion that comes from the top 1 percent or top 20 percent to be much higher," Gates said.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s epic rant against the super-rich in front of the super-rich at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos has turned the 30-year-old into a viral social media star.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York first unveiled a plan to hike taxes for the superrich, the outrage was harsh and swift. The proposal — which calls for the marginal tax rate on income above $10 million to be increased significantly, to 70% — faced immediate opposition from high-ranking Republican officials. Other pundits on social media used intense rhetoric in an attempt to discredit her proposition.

As survey data continues to show that raising taxes on the wealthy is extremely popular among the U.S. public, new research by inequality expert and University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman found that the richest 0.00025 percent of the American population now owns more wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent. Zucman, who helped Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) develop her "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" proposal, observed in a working paper (pdf) that "U.S. wealth concentration seems to have returned to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties."

Get Melania Trump on the horn: Someone’s been bullying Howard Schultz by calling him a “billionaire.” In an interview with CNBC last week, the former Starbucks CEO appeared to take personal offense to being described as a “billionaire.” He said that people should use the softer “people of wealth” or “people of means” to describe his class, which accounts for just 1 percent of the world’s population but controls more than half of its money.

Anand Giridharadas is an author and professor whose book “Winners Take All” is a scathing critique of the way elites treat philanthropy. Bill Gates called him a communist.

A discussion panel at the Davos World Economic Forum has become a sensation after a Dutch historian took billionaires to task for not paying taxes. In a video shared tens of thousands of times, Rutger Bregman, author of the book Utopia for Realists, bemoans the failure of attendees at the recent gathering in Switzerland to address the key issue in the battle for greater equality: the failure of rich people to pay their fair share of taxes.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said a society that "allows billionaires to exist" while some Americans live in abject poverty is "immoral." "I'm not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are immoral, but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access to public health is wrong," Ocasio-Cortez said during an event honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday.

The world's billionaires are growing $2.5 billion richer every day, while the poorest half of the global population is seeing its net worth dwindle. Billionaires, who now number a record 2,208, have more wealth than ever before, according to an Oxfam International report published Monday. Since the global financial crisis a decade ago, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled.

When Ronald Reagan took office, affluent Americans paid a 70 percent tax rate on all income above $216,000. In the decades since, our country’s highest earners have seen their annual pay skyrocket, while the median household’s has barely budged. As a result, America’s 160,000 richest families now lay claim to 90 percent of its wealth. Studies suggest that this kind of inequality erodes social trust, abets plutocracy, and depresses economic growth. Politicians from both major parties routinely suggest that they see inequality as a major problem.

Dmitry Rybolovlev has followed through with his plans of demolishing a massive Palm Beach mansion previously owned by Donald Trump. Rybolovlev purchased the 6.26 acre estate in 2008 for a record breaking $95,000,000. His plans changed with the discovery of mold, making the oceanfront home one of the nation’s most expensive tear downs. Donald Trump purchased the property in 2004 from Abe Gosman for $41,400,000.

An eight-year campaign to slash the IRS’s budget has left the agency understaffed, hamstrung, and operating with archaic equipment. The result: a hundred-billion-dollar heist. In the summer of 2008, William Pfeil made a startling discovery: Hundreds of foreign companies that operated in the U.S. weren’t paying U.S. taxes, and his employer, the Internal Revenue Service, had no idea. Under U.S. law, companies that do business in the Gulf of Mexico owe the American government a piece of what they make drilling for oil there or helping those that do.

At least 44 people have been killed in California a result of the wildfires that have burned more than 100,000 acres of land in the state. The most vulnerable populations, including the elderly and people with disabilities, are at the highest risk of perishing in the fires, which were made more likely by climate change that exacerbated dryness and tinder availability in fire-prone areas.

The 1% has never had it so good. The average wage for the 1% of income earners hit $719,000 per year in 2017, up 3.7% on the year, exceeding their peak of $716,000 per year just before the Great Recession, according to a report released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive, nonprofit think tank, citing data from the Social Security Administration. The average wage for the top 0.1% reached $2.7 million in 2017, the second-highest level ever, just 4% below their level in 2007.

More than 80 of the country's wealthiest people are paying the same or less income tax as the average worker, a shocking report has revealed. Ten years on from the economic crash, a combination of clever accounting and loopholes is allowing some of the country's richest individuals to minimise their contribution to the State's coffers. The Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) reviewed how 480 people, classified as 'High Wealth Individuals' (HWI), interact with the Revenue Commissioners.

The bottom line is that there has been very little increase in private sector compensation or W-2 wages since the end of 2017.. One of the leading arguments for the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 has been that it will raise the wages of rank-and-file workers, with congressional Republicans and members of the Trump administration promising raises of many thousands of dollars within ten years. The Trump administration’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers argued in April that we are already seeing the positive wage impact of the tax cuts:

New York is no longer the city with the biggest super-rich population. Hong Kong overtook the Big Apple to become the top destination for the planet's wealthiest people last year, according to a study published Thursday by research firm Wealth-X. The number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) residing in the Asian financial hub rose by almost a third in 2017 to 10,000, the study said.

The true story of how the City of London invented offshore banking – and set the rich free

“Change the world” has long been the cry of the oppressed. But in recent years world-changing has been co-opted by the rich and the powerful. “Change the world. Improve lives. Invent something new,” McKinsey & Company’s recruiting materials say. “Sit back, relax, and change the world,” tweets the World Economic Forum, host of the Davos conference. “Let’s raise the capital that builds the things that change the world,” a Morgan Stanley ad says. Walmart, recruiting a software engineer, seeks an “eagerness to change the world.” Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook says, “The best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company.”

Canada’s richest 87 families have roughly the same amount of wealth as that held by 12 million of their compatriots, or about a third of the country’s population, according to a new report. The report, published on Tuesday by the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, found that in 2016 the net worth of the richest was 4,448 times that of the average Canadian.